About Me

I'm Jason and I was born and raised in Manila. I started writing professionally at age 19, when my byline first appeared in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. I then became one of its student correspondents, and my assignments included being a gasoline boy and a T.G.I. Friday's waiter for a day.
At present, I'm an Intranet content manager and a contributing lifestyle journalist.
My work has also appeared in SilkWinds (Singapore), Aspire (Hong Kong), and www.interaksyon.com.
I mainly blog about food, movies, and occasionally, current events.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

I was bent on not watching Fast Five or Fast and The Furious 5 because the trailer bored me to death:

(My friends and I watch movies every time, which means I saw this trailer in the theaters over and over and over again; it became obnoxious.)

However, I began reading reviews, which I found intriguing. It was getting more raves than rants.

Fine, I decided to see it.

Before the movie, I went through the Fast and the Furious entries on Wikipedia just so I wouldn't get lost in the plot since this is, chronologically, the fourth installment in the series. (F&F: Tokyo Drift takes place in the future.)

I also learned that seeing Vin Diesel and The Rock together for the first time (this is the first F&F for The Rock), is a huge deal. I guess it's like seeing Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren in a sequel to Death Becomes Her (Sorry Goldie).

Well, it was a good thing the movie was better than the trailer. Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) escapes from prison with the help of Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) and Mia Toretto (Jordana Brewster), as seen in the end of Fast & Furious 4. The group then find themselves in Brazil, where they clash with business magnate Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida), who runs a string of illegal activities and who is powerful enough to have an entire police station under his payroll. To bring Hernan down, Dom assembles an elite team, the members of which will be familiar to fans of F&F, but looks more like a mature Benetton ad campaign for me.

(When token sexy, albeit anorexic-looking, gal Gal Gadot appeared onscreen, my cerebral database just knew she was a Miss Universe contestant. It turned out that she was: she represented Israel in 2004. She did not place.)

Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson aka The Rock) arrives in Brazil to head the photo shoot for the new catalogue of International Male.

Dom and Luke then go head to head in a bid to become Brazil's Next Top Model. These two are massive and we see their raging biceps and erect nipples, which long for emancipation under their tight shirts and tank tops, many times. While they were manhandling each other, I saw a lot of sexual tension between the two. Maybe they should remake Death Becomes Her.

The film (directed by Justin Lin) is funny and entertaining, and I'm sure fans would get a kick out of the many private jokes that reference previous F&F films. However, I would have found it even more entertaining (the novelty of biceps, nipples and bulges wears off pretty soon) if the writer (Chris Morgan) put more brains into ***WARNING: Spoiler coming up*** how the group carried out plans to amass Hernan's money. For example, they needed a hand print to access a biometrics-controlled vault and their solution was get to him to touch a bikini bottom and transfer that print onto a transparent film?***Spoiler ends*** The film could've used some sophistication similar to Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible but I guess F&F didn't want to take itself too seriously.

As when the duo, Dom and Brian, wreaked havoc in the streets of São Paulo and practically trashed everything on sight: I can't help but think that surely, the Brazil government is going to announce a National Day of Mourning for all innocent casualties the next day. But for Dom and Brian, it was just another fast, furious and fun ride.